Advanced process control (APC) is applied to semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) technology for manufacturing quality and efficiency, especially when semiconductor IC technology is continually progressing to circuit layouts having smaller feature sizes as well as increased density. During a semiconductor process with advanced process control, initial values of the parameters in the APC model are provided to start the APC process. In the existing method, the initial values of the APC model parameters are manually provided by engineers. A process engineer may manually assign the initial values based on experience or best guess estimates. However, the existing method is limited with several issues. There is higher chance that the guess can shoot far away from the target values. For example, a polysilicon etch model has only about 50% or less success rate. A second pilot run has to be added to the manufacturing cost if the first pilot run has failed. In another case, the process engineer may reach better initial values of the APC model by filtering more information and spending more time. Again, it is time consuming and the manufacturing cost is increased. Continued improvements to a semiconductor processing tool with advanced process control are therefore desired.